A fresh ruling tests how far the Supreme Court's Ames decision really reaches for employers
A fired Texas teacher tried to use a 2025 Supreme Court discrimination ruling to revive his case. The Fifth Circuit said no.
On June 1, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a Title VII claim brought by Joe Bravo, a former Dallas Independent School District teacher. The ruling tests how far the Supreme Court's Ames decision actually reaches, and the answer matters for any employer defending a discrimination claim in the Fifth Circuit.
The facts are short. The District fired Bravo after six students complained that he made racially insensitive remarks in the classroom. Bravo, who is Mexican-American, sued, arguing the District had discriminated against him because of his ancestry, in violation of Title VII.
He never got to a jury. The trial court granted the District summary judgment, a ruling that ends a case before trial when one side lacks enough evidence, because Bravo could not identify a similarly situated comparator. That idea is central to discrimination law: to keep a claim alive, an employee usually has to point to someone outside their protected class who did substantially the same thing and was treated better. Bravo couldn't, so his case ended.
On appeal, he changed tack. He argued that Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, decided by the Supreme Court in 2025, had scrapped the comparator requirement. Ames struck down a rule that made majority-group plaintiffs meet a higher evidentiary standard than other workers, and it cautioned courts against rigid versions of the test used to screen discrimination claims.
The Fifth Circuit rejected the argument. It held that Ames does not clearly apply to Bravo's circumstances and that its own comparator rule is already flexible enough to survive the Supreme Court's guidance. The court pointed to its own precedent warning that the comparator analysis cannot be applied too rigidly. With the comparator requirement intact, Bravo's claim failed at the starting line, and the panel affirmed without reaching his remaining arguments.
The takeaway for HR is practical. In the Fifth Circuit, an employee alleging discrimination still generally needs to name a comparator who got better treatment under nearly identical circumstances. Ames did not change that. And the case is a reminder of how often discrimination claims rise or fall on this single question, long before a court ever examines whether the underlying conduct justified the decision.
That makes consistency the quiet hero of any defense. When discipline rests on conduct complaints, treating similar situations the same way, and keeping records that prove it, is what stops a claim from ever reaching a jury. Here, the court never had to decide whether Bravo's remarks warranted firing. It only had to find that he couldn't show someone comparable was treated more gently.
